Why DLES.gg doesn't have an online community?

Hey, you there, what a great question you asked.

It would make a total sense, wouldn't it? Regular visitors could connect to a chat, probably Discord, talk about games they play, there will be game makers so they can meet their heroes, and the heroes can totally hear what their players saying about their games, they can all make each other a better people, have real time conversations and generally have a great time.

Yes, I see you, good points dear reader.

So, why not?

Such place already exists!

For real, where?

The best dle player and maker community is the Discord run by a dle maker and collector aukspot, there hang out many dle makers, who often chat about their games, technology stacks, growth, but also about monetization, pros and cons of AI and much more. Aukspot hit the right spot of setting great discord server rules so players who just want to post their scores have dedicated chats for each game to do just that. There are also rooms where people can suggest new games, so a great place to discover new games too.

Duplication

So back to the original question, setting up yet another dle chat room would simply split the traffic of the "right people" between multiple servers and create some confusion of where's the right place to chat about dles.

My strong aversion to duplication comes from an IRL experience. I run a hackathon style meetup in Edinburgh, Scotland and as an event organizer, I want to let everyone know about it. There's a fantastic event calendar where people can promote their events and I always post there. But recently other tech event calendars started to pop-up and in order to get my event in front of everyone, I need to post there too, which is great for the calendar owners who want to build their own audience, but terrible for event organizers who need to keep track of all the possible calendars where to promote. And most importantly, also not great for people who are trying to find events to attend.

Are there any other good places?

Of course there are, another good one, I visit often myself is Reddit's r/wordgames - the mods are very chilled and allow people to post their freshly made games, so good for discovering new games and for receiving feedback if you are a maker.

Moderation

There's one more reason I don't host my own chat room: moderation.

As a host, you're kinda responsible how people feel at yours (event or community). And since you can't really cherry pick your guests and only let nice people in, certain level of moderation is required. There's famously ton of invisible work in moderation of HackerNews which I believe is one of the best tech forum in the world for all things tech/startups. Many years ago, I attempted to build a version of that for automotive industry, what happened? The day I launched the project I had like 40 comments a minute posting horrible things, insults to ethnic minorities, swearing, hate speech and I was a single dev building a side project and I just needed to take the entire commenting feature down, since I didn't have the capacity to manage it. That left me a bit stained, and since then I'm avoiding that kind of responsibility.

TLDR

Are you looking for a DLE online community where you can chat with other players or makers? Head to aukspot's discord. Remember to be a nice person, always, you don't know what the other person on the chat is going through.

DLES.gg still continues to be a lively place, but rather in terms of collecting, written content like blog posts, reviews and newsletter. If you'd like to write an article about dles and have it published here, please do! Send it to peter@dles.gg with a little intro about you, so I know who's on the other side. I'd love to post articles that are not written only by me.